American Journal of Qualitative Research June 2021, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 94-141 https://doi.org/10.29333/ajqr/10814 © 2021 AJQR. http://www.ajqr.org ISSN: 2576-2141 Towards a Qualitative Model of Religious Worship Experiences: Perceived Encounters with the Divine in the Ritual Context of Musical Devotion Practices Yoshija Walter1 a, b, c aLaboratory for Cognitive Neurosciences, University of Fribourg, Switzerland bUniversity Hospital of Psychiatry UPD, University of Bern, Switzerland cInstitute for Management and Digitalization, Kalaidos University of Applied Sciences Zurich, Switzerland ABSTRACT The current qualitative study investigates how religious experiences, in this case subjectively perceived encounters with the divine in worship practices, are induced and experienced by believers under the influence of music. Fifteen worship experts (worship leaders and pastors known to engage in this spiritual state in music) were recruited from Pentecostal and charismatic churches. A qualitative model for religious worship, incorporating essence, meaning, music, method, and experience is proposed. It shows that there is not just ‘one’ religious experience in worship but that there are many of them (a preliminary typology is attempted). There is a feedback loop between the music, the focus on the divine and the mental associations that can strengthen or weaken the experience. The role of music in worship, two approaches to religious experiences (i.e., the sui generis and the attribution theory), and the possibilities for future research are discussed. KEYWORDS: Devotion, Music, Phenomenology of Religion, Religious Experience, Worship. When asked about specific religious worship experiences, one of the participants in the current research sample expressed the following remarks: I felt the presence of God permeating the whole room. It was so thick that it was almost like you could cut it with a knife. Even until today, I don’t understand the full meaning of this experience. But almost every minute, there was a power surge flowing through my body. I can’t tell you why. But it felt like a heartbeat was pulsating through me. And the whole thing seemed like this was the heartbeat of God. Such religious experiences can have a powerful impact on the lives of believers and in some cases they may play a lasting and transformative role where one wishes to invest one’s life on a higher cause (Trinitapoli & Vaisey, 2009). The centrality of religiosity scale CRS (Huber & Huber, 2012) models a person’s religiosity along the five dimensions of intellect, ideology, public practice, private practice and religious experience. Whereas philosophers have given much thought to religion’s intellectual and ideological dimensions, sociologists have had a strong focus on public practice and psychologists have been intrigued by private practice 1 Correspondent Author E-Mail: [email protected] 94 (Hood, 1995). The natural and neurological sciences have put an emphasis on mental states (Hick, 2006a), although the biological study of religious phenomena is still in its infancy. So far, empirical research on religious experience is rather scarce. Religious experience has been described as a ‘direct contact to an ultimate reality’ (Stark & Glock, 1968, p. 126) and the inventors of the CRS discern between two forms: (i) one-to-one experiences and (ii) oneness experiences (Huber & Huber, 2012, p. 715). The first is a dialogical mode where the believer feels to be in conversation and in contact with God or a higher power. The second one is a participative form where the person feels to be in unison or deeply connected to the divine. From the subject’s point of view, such extraordinary sensations could be labelled as ‘encounters with the divine’ and it is uncontroversial that they can be of tremendous relevance to a person having these mental excitations: “… what is happening to a subject's belief system when he has a religious experience is a catastrophic readjustment” (Webb, 1985, p. 85). However, such experiences can also be more mundane and can be integrated into a person’s daily life. This makes the phenomenological study thereof a broad topic that has had difficulties to settle on a generally accepted typological model (Boyatzis, 2001; Hick, 2006b; Stark, 1965). Nevertheless, some fundamental key questions have yet not received their deserved attention, namely how the diversity of religious experiences manifest and how exactly – that is, by what physical and psychological mechanisms – they can be induced. These are the main questions that the current study wants to tackle. In accordance with newer conceptualizations of the phenomenon, like the interactive religious experience model (Leeuwen & Elk, 2019), the current study assumes that religious beliefs cause people to seek situations where the impact of a supernatural agent is expected. One of these sought-out situations is the active engagement in worship, where believers often hope to experience an intimate communion with a higher power. This makes worship experiences an ideal case for contributing to disentangle these dynamics in the field of religious experiences. Theoretical Background: Religious Experience and Worship Ever since the publication of William James’ classic work The varieties of religious experience (1902), the interest in the phenomenological analyses of such occurrences has been popularized. However, researchers, authors and commentators have had many quarrels about the very idea of religious experience. It is broad and fuzzy, making it difficult to conceptualize and even to agree on something as mundane as defining the necessary terms (Yamane, 1998). Almost a century ago, it has been contested that “There is perhaps no vaguer phrase in contemporary religious thought than 'religious experience’’ (Aubrey, 1933). Jones (1972) spoke of the ‘problem’ of religious experience and what makes it difficult to conceptually handle is that there are many kinds of phenomenal occurrences that fit under this umbrella term (Hollenbach, 1952). There is a complexity at play that is intricately affected by the social dynamics between a believer and his or her community (Morris, 2012). Some authors tried to aid empirical research in this field by developing constructs like the Spiritual Experience Index (Genia, 1991) or the Daily Spiritual Experience Scale (Underwood, 2006). To some degree, constructs like these help us to instill the intuition that extraordinary experiences can be made tangible or perhaps even quantized. Although it appears to be difficult to agree upon an exhaustive definition of religious experience, there seems to be unanimity on the Jamesean notion that they are ‘immediate personal experiences’ (James, 1902, p. 30). It may be worth noting that in James’ classic view, subjectively perceived supernatural experiences are the key constituents of religion by and large. Historically, the major conceptual conflict has lied in the question of whether so-believed divine occurrences are an experiential class in and of their own or whether they are merely 95 elevated to a special status through the believer’s interpretation. The first approach is called the ‘sui generis theory’ (Eliade, 1960; Pals, 1987; Studstill, 2000) and the second one is referred to as the ‘attributional theory’ (Barnard, 1992; Hermans, 2015). On the one hand, if having a religious experience means having a sensation which is unlike any other and cannot be explained by or compared to something of the same sort, then a religious experience is a category in and of itself; a so-called category sui generis. On the other hand, if having a divine experience means that an otherwise ordinary event is singled out and by the sheer force of a believer’s interpretation of the facts becomes seen as ‘divine’ or ‘religious’, then this special status is attributed to the experience. Psychologically, the former would be a pre-interpretation scenario and the latter would be a post-interpretation one (Antes, 2002; Braley, 2006; Robinson, 2003). These two scenarios entail an interesting question which has captured the attention of authors from a diverse panoply of disciplines: do ‘encounters with the divine’ carry phenomenal features that ‘make’ them religious from the very beginning when they are conceived? Or are they rather made ‘divine’ or ‘religious’ by a feat of post-hoc interpretation when the human brain integrates the sensations with already held beliefs and when the person tries to make sense of the experience in light of his or her social environment? Ann Taves (2005, 2009, 2011) has contributed much to studying this domain and she leans towards an attributional approach where people singularize otherwise ‘special’ occurrences. By force of interpretation, one deems an experience as religious. Her theory is helpful not only because it creates a bridge between the humanities and social sciences with the cognitive and neurological sciences, but also because it breaks down religious experiences into building blocks. First, Taves differentiates between ascriptions and attributions: • Ascriptions of qualities: This is how a person subjectively characterizes the inherent qualities of an experience. The experiencer perceives a special nature in the occurrence. Examples: A person may feel unified with the cosmos or with God; one may feel blissful in a worship ceremony; someone may believe to be hearing the voice of a supernatural agent. • Attributions of causality: These are subjective explanations of causality. The experiencer attributes